“New York is a fighting state. Madison Square Garden is a fighting venue. It’s meant to be here.” —Pete “Drago” Sell
It may be a state full of fighters in a metaphorical sense. But there are actual fighters there, athletes comparable to those on the field in the Bronx’s Yankee Stadium, or on the court at Syracuse’s Carrier Dome or at Madison Square Garden in Manhattan.
Those athletes are banned by the state from practicing their sport. Exhaustive efforts to legalize the emerging sport of Mixed Martial Arts — “MMA” — have been unsuccessful and 2015 was a particularly painful year for MMA supporters. Efforts in both the legislature—where an amended bill containing enhanced protection for fighters garnered increased support but failed just prior to the end of the legislative session- and the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York were unsuccessful. While the amended bill provided a positive framework for the 2016 legislative session and the dismissal of the Federal Court action (on constitutional grounds as well as a purported lack of standing) is currently on appeal, the fate of MMA in New York remains uncertain. The fight for legalization, and the response from the opposition, is complex, but the context is simple.
Professional MMA is illegal in New York, and only New York. However, amateur MMA is legal but conducted under a patchwork of oversight and regulation that leaves athletes-and spectators-more vulnerable due to a poorly written ban that was enacted in 1997 when MMA bore scant resemblance to its present iteration. The ban and the ramifications therein stretch to the Empire State’s every corner.
Introduction
Promoters, politicians, and legal experts have certain levels of vested interest in MMA as a whole, and in its presence in the State of New York.
But none of them ever hit the mat to compete.
The athletes are at the epicenter of this controversial sport. Throughout the years-long fight between New York State officials and supporters of MMA, politicians, doctors, and top executives in the sport have made their voices heard. Seldom has the lower-profile MMA athlete been able to do the same.
The Longo-Weidman MMA gym in Garden City, NY gave perspective that those other interested parties can’t provide.
An Alternative to the Big Four
“The four major North American sports”—a phrase so ingrained that the four sports need no identification. Those team sports, and individual endeavors with a golf club or tennis racket, have dominated this country’s sporting world for over a century. But hundreds of millions of American youths have come and grown in that time, and, for a litany of reasons those sports don’t appeal to them all.
Enter MMA, a relatively new phenomenon that requires nothing but a mat and a body. And the athletes at Longo-Weidman are happy to explain why it struck such a chord.
Robby Plotkin: “I didn’t like normal sports.”
Anthony Genovese: “I’m small.”
Eddie “Truck” Gordon, of UFC fame: “Playing football, I got hurt a lot worse.”
These are simple, empathic explanations. Children everywhere can be too short for basketball, too health-conscious for football, too disinterested in anything else.
These fighters, all of whom are barred from fighting in their home state, were struck by inspiration early in life and share the same passion for their craft as any other athlete, if not more so.
“I loved watching Bruce Lee and other mixed martial arts movies growing up,” says Plotkin. “[MMA] started as a way to better myself physically. But it provides an inner connection between mind and body that other sports don’t offer.”
Genovese is bundle of muscles that would fit in on the gridiron were those muscles taller than 5’5”2. His height limited him to wrestling, and it led to MMA. “In wrestling [and MMA] there are weight classes, which makes for an even playing field,” he says. “No other sport has that.”
The Injury Issue
Major players involved in the MMA bill have several objections to legalizing it in New York State, but the biggest concern is fighter safety, and rightfully so. Despite outward appearances, MMA is a safe sport, and one closely monitored both by the fighters and those around them.
Several of the fighters that spoke asserted the majority of injuries they suffered, head-related or otherwise, occurred during training or sparring periods, not in a bout. Three of every five MMA fights end via submission, a technique that requires little to no bodily striking and reduces the chance of injury. In general, most in-fight injuries are simple lacerations or abrasions, according to The American College of Sports Medicine. These are open wounds that look worse to the viewer than they are to the fighter.
But it gives opponents of the sport all the ammunition they need to call it brutal and barbaric, words that simply don’t provide an accurate depiction of the sport.
MMA certainly isn’t free from head injuries, but fighters and proponents alike resist a comparison to the NFL. “Playing football, I got hurt a lot worse,” said Gordon.
He believes his worst in-fight injury to be a mild concussion, one that led to a 90-day medical suspension from the league. Only after being cleared by a doctor was Gordon allowed to fight again.
“It’s a fact that MMA is safer than boxing and my first love, football.”
Those less familiar with MMA freely categorize them as equally dangerous to the brain, but the differences — both in reception of head injuries and the treatment and league-mandated monitoring that ensues — are stark.
The New York Senate Floor
Carl Heastie’s enthusiasm for the Mixed Martial Arts Bill was palpable, and he was not alone. But the Speaker of the New York State Assembly and MMA hopefuls — legislators, fighters, and fans alike — watched another attempt at legalizing the sport die with the bill, on June 24, 2015.
Since the 1997 ban on MMA issued by then-Governor George Pataki, bills presented to the assembly that addressed the issue of lifting the sanctions have failed, failed, and failed again. Assemblyman Joseph Lentol has represented North Brooklyn in the Assembly since 1972 and has been around for the duration. He saw the same initial backlash to the sport in the Assembly that still resonates today, albeit on a smaller scale; barbaric, primitive, and synonyms thereof repeated ad nauseam to a general public that didn’t know better. “When people don’t know about something,” Lentol said, “their initial reaction is suspicion and fear.” As other states began to legalize and regulated the sport — and it became a key distinction to use that five-letter word — opinions slowly began to change.
Lentol and Majority Leader Joseph Morelle watched over this bill carefully, and Morelle amended the bill at the last minute to include fighter safety measures and insurance policies. But the bill failed to get to the floor for a vote for the sixth time in a row.
Frustration was pervasive, but answers were fleeting. If support has continued to grow with each attempt, as the consensus seems to believe, what happened? Why was 2015’s story so familiar?
The State Assembly Committee on Tourism, Parks, Arts, and Sport Development, chaired by Margaret Markey, has managed to rally support in suffocating the MMA bill at the committee level, rendering it unable to move to the floor for a vote. Markey has been an outspoken opponent of the Bill, however, explaining that the mobility of the bill had nothing to do with her position, but rather the fact that, in her words, “no one had been seriously pressing the issue.”
This assertion has trouble holding water, given the groundswell of support within the legislature for legalization. Former Assemblyman Dennis Gabryszak had in past years been an opponent of legalizing MMA in NY, but had changed his position after realizing the economic opportunities that MMA would bring.
Lentol explained the bill’s failure as a byproduct of a complicated and crowded political system. There were too many issues of importance — protecting tenants and affordable housing in Brooklyn filled his plate, and the MMA bill hit the backburner. The legislative session was extended an extra week, but a significant amount of voters were out of Albany — much of the bill’s support was spread around the state, unable to vote at all. According to Morelle, this was the death knell to a bill that needed every vote it could get.
In short, politics are pervasive and complicated. Nothing that ever enters the legislature is a sure thing, and this bill was far from that to begin with. With an eye to the future, supporters have learned — many times — that the political hurdle isn’t going anywhere.
What’s Next for Politicians?
In the aftermath of a defeat, in the legislative arena or in an actual one, the easiest course of action is inaction. A fighter can drop a close match and either hit the gym the next morning or lose all motivation to try again. The same applies to those on the political side of the MMA in New York State debate. Now that the bill has failed for the eighth consecutive time and postmortems have been issued, the microscope turns to the future once more.
The MMA bill, and any of its past failures or future successes, is inherently political, and relies significantly upon the legislative process. This is to say things are messy, convoluted, and never guaranteed to finish on time. Whenever a time-sensitive bill is put to the floor near the session’s end, a risk is intrinsic; the session may run long, and if it does, time will run out. When Morelle and his co-sponsors rehash the issue in 2016, they will make changes, and they will try to change minds, but they can’t change the procedure of government itself.
To combat that, Morelle can give plenty of advance notice in 2016. The assemblyman is planning to submit a revised bill significantly earlier next time around, to “avoid a situation similar to the one we faced this year.”
The hard part of the process should be the aggregating of votes; a consensus isn’t an easy thing to reach. Morelle is steadfast in his belief that the bill had the votes to pass, but those votes weren’t physically in the building. The elimination of any procedural doubt is a considerable hurdle in legalizing MMA in New York.
Also key to the MMA battle is swinging those voters who get caught up on the aesthetics of the sport, including State Senator Liz Krueger, one of the bill’s more outspoken opponents. Krueger stated that “this is an extremely dangerous sport where bad things can and do happen,” spoken with the unequivocal conviction of someone who’s held this belief for as long as the MMA battle has raged in the legislature.
To those around the sport, MMA is defined by calculated, highly efficient force that presents only a fraction of the same head trauma risks and general danger that football does on even the most innocuous of plays. But, undeniably, the sport has a certain visual quality that has the potential to make outsiders uncomfortable. Krueger cited growing youth participation in MMA as the chief cause of her discomfort, and she plans to be as significant of a hurdle in 2016 as she’s been in years past.
“I don’t know if a compromise can get reached,” she said, representing one of two equally hardheaded sides that have fought this battle plenty of times.
“It is a matter of educating and working with opponents to help them understand the safety protections we have added,” Morelle said. Those protections included an accident insurance fund that would require promoters to cover $50,000 per fighter, as well as an overall policy of $1 million, all overseen by the New York State Athletic Commission.
Regarding those benefits, Krueger: “The insurance is pretty minimal. It was the weakest part of the bill.” She continued to reference potential head injuries that are among her biggest hang-ups on the sport.
Well versed in this exact conversation, Morelle also referenced a 2006 Journal of Sports Science and Medicine study revealing that “MMA, if properly regulated, is as safe, if not safer than, other contact sports,” a finding with which Krueger disagrees vehemently.
“The sport does almost nothing to protect the fighters from ending up with long-term brain injuries and a potential future with early dementia.”
Amateur MMA is wildly popular in the state despite being completely unregulated. Uncharted waters in a sport like this are dangerous, and fighters go without the kind of medical protection this bill promised them. Morelle’s plan for 2016 is to focus on just that; convince doubters that the best way to quell their concerns over fighter safety is the opposite of what they’ve done for eight years.
Krueger and Morelle share a concern over unregulated MMA — in fact, Krueger voted in favor of a past iteration of the bill that only dealt with the government regulation of amateur MMA. Her reservations with wide-scale legalization continued, but keeping an eye on amateurs was a step in the right direction.
Since then, the bill dealing with amateur regulation and the bill to legalize the sport have merged, and Krueger has prioritized keeping MMA out of New York over policing those amateur fights.
Still, given the strong opposition, Morelle is confident.
“MMA will be legalized in New York State,” he says, citing the “critical need to ensure amateur participant safety.”
Krueger is, predictably, just as confident.
“I’m a legislator in Albany. Everyone always says everything is inevitable. If you look back at how many times they have said this is inevitable, I’ve lost count.”
What’s Next for Promoters?
While promoters and sanctioning bodies both stress safety as their main focus, that focus manifests itself in different ways. Promoters in New York State are not currently required to report to a sanctioning body — The World Kickboxing Association, The International Sport Karate Association and The United States Muay Thai Association, to name a few — when hosting an amateur event.
These organizations exist to train referees, judges, and officials, monitor adherence to rules and regulations, and provide fighters with health insurance coverage, among other responsibilities. The benefit of promoter affiliation is clear for the fighters. But will legalizing MMA in New York be good for the promoters’ bottom line?
Not all promoters are created equal. Those exclusively on the amateur side of things are strapped for cash, and legalization will price them out. “[Legalization] will hurt the promoters,” according to Tom Kilkenny, co-owner and promoter of Aggressive Combat Championship, considered a top amateur promoter in the state, “because the state wants to tax MMA so high.”
Kilkenny and his peers contend that legalization will kill the amateur business model — given a choice, fighters will look to turn pro, and those professional promoters can easily pay the steep tax rates.
“In Manhattan, paying the fighters isn’t really of much consequence to me financially.” Kevin Patrick sees the issue as complex shades of gray, because his deep pockets enable him to do so. The CEO of Victory Combat Sports helped to bring amateur MMA to New York State, but the man running what he calls “the Northeast’s premiere fight promotion” has brought professionally sanctioned fights to five other states in the region.
As a Manhattan promotion, Victory has big revenues- but need those big revenues to offset the big expenses. Everything is more expensive in Manhattan, and if the entire state were to open its arms to MMA, a promoter could save on rent and operations by establishing locations deeper into the outer boroughs and farther upstate.
The issue would become the ability to pay fighters, and the bigger promoters will use their size and financial clout. “Paying fighters wouldn’t move the needle much for [us] economically,” says Patrick, “but pros are much easier to manage than amateurs.”
In the continuous struggle between profession and amateur, a growing consensus has established a need for greater incentives to turn pro. Patrick says, “I think it is even more important… to have fees and suspensions for athletes who don’t get blood work in on time, don’t get the medicals done on time, perhaps even have forged medical information.”
He wants similar responsibility on the promoter’s behalf; ringside doctors and ambulances should be standard at every fight, on the organizer’s dime. The overwhelming majority of local promoters say fighter safety should be paramount; a collection of those promoters placed their own financial success lower on the totem pole. Regulation ensures procedures and safety standards are met, without reservation, by all parties involved.
Nick Lembo, Chief Counsel for the New Jersey State Athletic Control Board and overseer of all things MMA in New Jersey, shares these concerns from a perspective of a safer haven for the sport. Fighters under Lembo’s watch have been banned from competition because of positive tests for hepatitis C, HIV, or for physical maladies that can cause even further harm if irritated in the octagon, and Lembo says many of those fighters “have competed freely in amateur MMA in New York… at shows without such direct supervision.”
The balance between amateur and professional supervision of fights always boomerangs back to fighter safety, and if the promoters are to be believed, that will always be the top priority. That priority will lead the discussion on any future legalization of the sport in New York State.
A Look to the Past
The 1996 Professional Boxing Safety Act, and its amendment four years later, known as the Ali Act, hit the boxing world to address core issues of the sport. Many of these issues, such as athlete safety and equality, face MMA the way they faced boxing nearly 20 years ago. Addressing these issues properly requires the same legislative approach, and if any future laws are properly implemented and enforced, athletes will be better protected, and New York State will have one less reason to support a full ban on MMA.
The Safety and Ali Acts were introduced when boxing promoters held tremendous power, as UFC and their fellow promoters do today in Mixed Martial Arts. With the power came widespread rumors of exploitation and fixes, both of rankings and matches themselves. A lack of standardized procedure to ensure boxer safety only made matters worse, and led Congress to a disturbing conclusion as they passed the Ali Act. Boxing was completely unregulated, and fighters were completely unprotected, both to injury and to unscrupulous practice from their promoters.
If that sounds familiar, it is; MMA is 2015’s boxing, and New York is the unlegislated territory that leads to the same conclusions that Congress reached 15 years ago.
As it stands, professional MMA events in each state are regulated either by the state itself or by boxing commissions. The Ali Act requires standardized supervision by an athletic commission of the state recognized by the Association of Boxing Commission (ABC), a structure that has led to a fragmentation of authority and enforcement. But what truly provides the acts with power is the ability of the United States Attorney General to bring civil actions against violators, with the potential for hefty fines and prison time. Any federal law passed for MMA should encompass similar legal power under the regulation, and unlike the Ali Act, it should be enforced by a unified organization.
The Safety Act requires all boxing matches to be supervised by state athletic commissions, and that all boxers submit to a physical exam by a certified physician. Further, an ambulance must be in the facility at all times, and an attentive ringside doctor is to be alongside the fight. A visit to an MMA event in Jamaica, Queens, hosted by the New York Fight Exchange, revealed that all four of the Safety Act’s requirements were met and the promoters paid tremendous attention to fighter safety.
Unfortunately, such stringent attention is not always par for the course. Dennis Munson, Jr., 24, died during an amateur MMA event in Milwaukee last March. It took 15 minutes before the paramedics were called, and the fight agreement stipulated they were to be on the scene at all times.
Adrienne Simmons of Atlanta died in an amateur kickboxing tournament in Orlando; the promoters didn’t even have an ambulance on site. State authorities claimed they have no authority to conduct an investigation because it was an unregulated event.
It stands to reason that federal regulations regarding the safety of MMA fighters should cover both professional and amateur MMA events. Physicians, scientists and doctors should be under constant consultation to address head trauma and formulate standardized procedures for concussion-related injuries. Injuries suffered during both bouts and training needs to be taken into consideration in the drafting of any legislation.
When asked what flaws he sees in the UFC, Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban claims, “Their contracts don’t adhere to the Ali Reform Act. There will come a time in the not-distant future when they will be required to.” The statement was made in 2008, and 2015 has seen no change in that regard. If a federal law similar to that of the Safety and Ali Acts is passed, legislators and politicians in the state will have no reason to reject MMA any longer. Such action would inform the state that the federal government is behind the sport, and that they are also trying to make the sport safer and fairer for the fighters.
Scott Coker, President of Bellator MMA, was recently asked about the application of the Ali Act on MMA, and proved receptive of the idea. He noted that he is not advocating a straight adaptation of the Ali Act, but that “something needs to be done” in protecting the fighters. The fundamental differences between the sports necessitates more than simply copying past legislation. If MMA is in New York’s future, this must serve as a guide.
Conclusion
“People are afraid of what they don’t understand,” said Truck Gordon. “It’s not barbaric, it’s an art.”
Allegations of MMA’s brutality are a few steps too far, but it’s difficult for non-fighters to appreciate the sport as an art form. The divide between sides has led to a years-long standoff, and both sides remain stubborn as ever. The end is in sight for Joe Morelle, while Liz Krueger sees no future version of the State of New York with legal MMA inside its borders. Promoters of the sport — the supporters themselves — can’t even come to a consensus. And questions persist over how, if the sport were legalized, what the future landscape would look like.
And all that will be moot if history repeats in 2016. The whole fight, and all the years it’s taken and all the context that surrounds it, will be rendered irrelevant if politics continue to stand in the way of progress.
Meanwhile, the fighters wait, because it’s all they’ve been able to do. And they’ve developed a sense of perspective on the situation, a refreshing one compared to those provided by those fighting the battles outside the octagon.
“New York is a proud community,” said Robby Plotkin. “It’s hard to get friends and family to always travel and have a fan base.”
“We are athletes. We are respectful. We love to do what we do and we would love to be able to do it at home.”
This article was prepared by Columbia University’s Sports Management students Jason Benscher, Jackson Chow, Sarah Plotkin (related to fighter Robby Plotkin interviewed here), Nicole Muller, Chloe Ellis Johnson and Joshua Hammond as part of a unique study addressing the legal challenges facing the sport of MMA in New York. The class was created and led by Adjunct Professor Carla Varriale, of Havkins Rosenfeld Ritzert & Varriale.
